President Bush called John Kerry “the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time” yesterday as he and Republican backers launched a blistering counteroffensive in the battle over missing explosives in Iraq.

With the Iraq war continuing to be the main flash point in the campaign’s bitter final days, the Bush and Kerry teams traded ferocious charges over explosives that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation.

Bush, at a campaign appearance at a hockey stadium in Saginaw, Mich., charged Kerry has undertaken a “campaign of contradictions” and is making wild charges.

“The Senator’s willingness to trade principle for political convenience makes it clear John Kerry is the wrong man for the wrong job at the wrong time,” Bush said in a play on one of Kerry’s oft-used attack lines that the Iraq war was “the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Meanwhile, top Bush foreign policy aides struck back hard on the issue of missing explosives citing new evidence that the deadly material was likely removed by Saddam Hussein before U.S. troops ever got anywhere near Baghdad.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Kerry is “just dead wrong” that U.S. troops failed to protect the gigantic arms depot.

He was backed up by Col. David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division whose unit led the charge to Baghdad and eventually captured the weapons site in early April 2003.

Perkins said at the Pentagon yesterday it is “very highly improbable” that insurgents could have trucked hundreds of tons of material out of the site once U.S. forces were in the area because U.S. troops controlled the two major roads leading to the site and would have stopped the trucks.

Secretary of State Colin Powell also raised doubts about the amount of explosives that Kerry claims were removed from the site.

“The best possibility is that the explosives were gone before the troops got there; at least it’s an equal possibility,” said former Mayor Giuliani.

“John Kerry hasn’t admitted that. Instead, John Kerry became an attack dog,” Giuliani added on the NBC Today Show. Giuliani, who is supporting Bush, also said U.S. troops had the “actual responsibility” for searching weapons sites – not President Bush.

Kerry, campaigning with rock star Bruce Springsteen before a huge crowd at the state capital building in Madison, Wis., raised the issue for the fourth straight day, accusing Bush of giving “shifting explanations” on what happened, and adding that the case shows the war was badly planned.